Wednesday, April 2, 2014

It Turns Out GM Really will be Great when Pigs Fly

Anybody
remember when GM’s “Mark of Excellence” was a great ad slogan?

Sure, many
of the best and brightest worked and work at General Motors, but all the world
knows that the “excellence” was and remains hit-and-miss at the company
Capitalism built and broke.

Maybe the
culling of schlocky plasti-clad Pontiacs
and old fogey Oldsmobiles, not to mention most business-as-usual, has helped
calm and focus the Motown Monster lately.
Save for cleaning up more dreck from the Business as Usual Boys, GM
Chair and Fall Gal Mary Barra has an awful lot of hits on her hands these days.

Witness the
new Camaro Z/28. Faster around a race
track than a Porsche 911 Turbo S or Nissan GT-R Track Edition, according to the folks at Motor Trend. A punch in the face to
stratospherically-priced super cars the world-over for a mere 75k.

Except 75k
is more dear than mere. A base Corvette
will be better in every way on the street, and you’ll have 20k leftover to give to your kids for bus fare.

So what
sort of beast is this new 2015 Camaro Z/28?

It’s the
same kind as the original: built to race on tracks for real, not just in
marketing copy. Not very practical for
the street, judging by the speed-hump-catching enormity of the chin spoiler
alone. An instant collectible if you can
afford to buy one and store it for a few decades.

Yet this car most represents engineering brilliance in the face of adversity, as in
two tons of adversity. This latest
Camaro platform, borrowed from the Aussie Holden program, gained 600 pounds
over the Gen IV Camaro, and all the thin glass and no radio in the world could
shave no more than 300 pounds off the lump.

So if the
new Cadillac and recent Corvette lines aren’t hint enough, this
thoroughbred-out-of-the-whole-sow might drive the point home: GM is back, and it’s world-class for real,
not just in marketing copy.